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“... Dignam wasn’t buried, there to re-stage the same funeral, which never took place. A man in a brown mackintosh will lurk in the background. And in Toronto, two hundred or so will stroll along the shore of Lake Ontario, but refer to it as Sandy-mount, then walk to a series of other sites within the city, each renamed after a locality in Dublin – all in ...”

“... cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of Bristol: ‘In your memorable diaries you quote Disraeli’s view of May 1881, a month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about ...”

“... for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American ...”

“... Douglas Adams (hitchhiking through a galaxy of fading stars), Woody Allen, Kingsley Amis, Anon, John Aubrey, Auden and Ayckbourn. An Auden parody is called ‘Self-Congratulatory Ode ...’, but it is the purr of mutual congratulation which is deafening. ‘Parody is frequently welcomed by its victims, who recognise it as a compliment, however ...”

“... thrown over a wooden stump with a wet thwack. It lay hair-side up, liquid dripping from its curled brown ends. The stump is a smooth-topped wooden block, which comes to just below chest height. Once there, the hair (known as the nap) is removed with a long, curved knife (called a scudder) which has wooden handles at both ends. I had a go at this and the hair ...”

“... in the 1960s and 1970s. When visiting Duchamp on holiday in Cadaqués, Richard Hamilton and John Cage would try to avoid having to meet Dalí, whose villa was close by, and their hauteur is still felt by art historians and curators: Dalí was marginalised at the Hayward Gallery’s Undercover Surrealism exhibition in 2006, and at Tate Modern’s ...”

“... of Oriental and African Studies, a neatly lettered stone plaque attached to a nicely detailed brown brick wall reads: THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON HEREBY RECORDS ITS SINCERE APOLOGIES THAT THE PLANS OF THIS BUILDING WERE SETTLED WITHOUT DUE CONSULTATION WITH THE RUSSELL FAMILY AND THEIR TRUSTEES AND THEREFORE WITHOUT THEIR APPROVAL OF ITS DESIGN Directly ...”

“... the book becomes an entertaining scrapbook of portraits. We meet the television actress Noeline Brown, who was Hughes’s lover when he was beginning to gain some notice in Sydney as a critic, cartoonist and painter. She ‘looked and sounded rather like the young Marlene Dietrich’, but, no, she was better looking, and Dietrich herself ‘appealed mainly ...”

“... the cloth had stiffened it was moved to the right light and a painting of it made in black or dark brown and white pigment on fine linen. Beautiful examples of this type of picture, with remarkable effects of relief, can be convincingly associated with sculptures by Verrocchio and with paintings by two of his pupils, Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo. (The ...”

“... in the rock-leaved Bible of geology’. Those were the words of the pioneering geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1873. Thomas Moran, an experienced painter from Philadelphia, travelled with Powell, and had been to Wyoming and Montana with the US Geological and Geographical Survey two years ...”

“... than Labour – they don’t have to fear accusations of defeatism and a lack of patriotism. John Major continued the trend in the 1990s even as the navy argued vigorously for two new fleet carriers to replace the three small Invincible-class ships.This was effected under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and, after many ...”

“... John Charles Robinson​ , perhaps the greatest connoisseur Britain has ever known, was turned down on four occasions for the post of director of the National Gallery. He was thought to be too closely associated with the trade (‘little better than a dealer’), and was known to have operated with scant respect for officialdom when employed by the South Kensington museum ...”

“... argue back, convincingly and at length, that it isn’t. Their reasoning has influenced the Brown-Vitter bill, put before the US Senate in April, which seeks to mandate an equity level of 15 per cent for banks with assets of more than $500 billion. At the same time, the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (which has a keen interest ...”

“... if frequently unreadable – recent study (with facing translation) of Plautus’ Asinaria by John Henderson. Henderson explores, or dances around, Plautus’ representation of power relationships between sons, fathers, women and slaves. For Henderson, Plautus is both hilariously funny (‘it’s all a gas’: ridicula res est) and a biting social ...”

“... In 1886 there was an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery of the work of John Everett Millais (Sir John, in fact: he had recently been made a baronet). There were pictures from his Pre-Raphaelite infancy, like Isabella and Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop; anecdotal ones, like My First Sermon (a child portrait in the Bubbles line); landscapes (Chill October); pictures with stories (The Proscribed Royalist) and pictures from stories (Mariana ...”